Viva voce.

This is my second day as a blogger, and I felt like logging in again to my newly-created blog/website just to say hi to all those out in cyberspace who may have come across these musings! Log in directly through http://fromlocaltolingo.blogspot.com.

The title of the website seems weird? Well, I went from the Local Government service to the study of Languages, as I mentioned in yesterday's inaugural posting, hence the phrase 'fromlocaltolingo'; but I wouldn't normally have chosen such a bizarre and unwieldy title, as it is certainly not very user-friendly, to say the least. But in order to set up this blog, I had to choose a website title that wasn't already taken - or 'unavailable', as the blogging terminologists phrase it.

Moving on ...

Can I ask people out there to share the type of experiences they may have had when doing a viva voce? Was it a severe grilling, an aggressive Spanish Inquisition-type encounter? Or was it pleasant and relaxed? Or somewhere in between? Different fellow postgraduates to whom I have spoken have all reported very different individual experiences, ranging from the pleasant conversation about their work, to the nightmarish attack on their ideas.

My own experience of doing a viva for my thesis on Translation Studies, here in Dublin City University in September, 2009, just over a month ago, was, in retrospect, a reasonably positive experience, though it may not have seemed entirely pleasant at the time I was doing it, and in the immediate aftermath. It was a rigorous questioning and criticism, in which the examiners seemed to be playing Devil's Advocate roles, though this seems reasonable enough in the context of the tradition of having to defend a thesis, a practice dating back at least to medieval times. At first, I felt a bit overawed, but as the viva progressed, I gradually began to emerge from my shell and to politely but assertively defend my ideas and approaches. In fact, this seemed to be the response the examiners were seeking. The eventual result was the award of the degree subject to corrections including significant deletions, as I had written too much.

In the continental tradition, e.g. in such countries as France and Spain, doctoral candidates must mount a public defence of their thesis, and this sounds even more intimidating than the thankfully private defence which we Irish PhD students present of our research. What has been the experience of students in these countries of publicly defending their PhD theses? By the way, students from these countries, please feel free to respond/comment in French and/or Spanish if you wish.

Here's another question: what do people out there think about word limits imposed on theses? The allowable word counts for a doctoral thesis seem to vary widely from one country's university system to the next. In my university, the word limit for a doctoral thesis in the Humanities is 90,000 words; in the Natural Sciences, it can be significantly lower.

I found that 90,000 words was impossible to achieve, in the sense that I initially wrote about a million words! This was partly attributable to a style of writing which is not naturally concise, and this is something which I understandably have to work on for academic prose. But my excessive writing was mainly due to the fact that I presented way too much data and discussion of same, and I over-estimated the amount of work required for a PhD, in the sense that four chapters of data have had to be deleted!

I've been advised by the Examiners that I need to prioritize. This is a fair point... But I personally feel that if a student is prepared to put in the time to presenting a lot of additional data, and can put extra data in Appendices, then the work should be valued and not consigned to the scrapheap of oblivion!

Another question: how do you go about 'selling yourself' as an academic in Languages/Translation Studies and as a translator, when there are so few jobs out there, without sending out wheelbarrows of CVs that nobody will ever read?

That's enough about professional stuff for the moment! So I will complete this posting and say goodbye for now, and thanks for reading this. Your advice and comments on this posting will be very welcome.